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Farewell, Maxwell's: Ending a chapter in Hoboken's history, iconic rock club set to close this week

A darkened stage: The last days of Maxwell'sThe Star-Ledger documentary "A darkened stage: The last days of Maxwell's" looks back at the iconic Hoboken music venue and the individuals that came together to create the celebrated music scene that thrived there. Owners Todd Abramson and Steve Fallon, members of the band "a" and The Feelies, and Star-Ledger music writer Tris McCall recall the legendary club's heyday and explore the changes that led to a decision to close its doors on July 31, 2013. (A film by Michael Monday/The Star-Ledger)

Hoboken is still full of musicians....cockroaches and pop musicians will always survive. But it's feeling like the end of a remarkable success story.

It was 1978 and Glenn Morrow, rocker and future owner of Bar/None Records, heard a casual bit of news that would change the lives of thousands and alter the course of a city's redevelopment.

"A friend of mine came to my apartment — she'd moved to Hoboken around the same time I did," says Morrow. "She said, 'There's a bar around the corner that wants to have live original music of a modern variety.'

"I was stunned. The only room we knew about at the time in New Jersey that would have us was out in Dover. Now, here was a place to play right where we were living."

The bar was Maxwell's. For years, a tavern had slumbered on the corner of Washington and 11th streets, serving cheap beers to the workers at the massive Maxwell House plant on the Hudson River waterfront. But Morrow learned that it had lately come under new ownership — ownership aligned with the arts community then budding in an area best known for factories and hard manual labor.

That community required a place to gather; musicians with offbeat, idiosyncratic projects needed a place to play. Most of all, a weary city needed a place to reimagine itself.

"The day we opened," says Steve Fallon, who bought the building with his siblings and their spouses, "we were still trying to get hinges on the front door. People were literally walking over us to get into the bar.

"Hoboken was ready."

The Bongos, one of the band's that became synonymous with Maxwell's, outside the club in 1981.Phil Marino

HARD DECISION

Maxwell's, which closes Wednesday night after a remarkable 35-year run, will shut its doors on a Hoboken that has been radically transformed.

Most of the traces of the city's manufacturing history are gone, replaced by new residential construction and businesses catering to commuters, post-collegiate hedonists and young families.

Many of the artists and musicians who made Hoboken a destination — and Maxwell's its high temple — in the '80s have skipped town for hipper, cheaper zip codes.

Yet one of the most remarkable things about the Maxwell's story is how many of its principal characters remain active in the Mile Square City and continue to give the town its peculiar character.

The history of Maxwell's is recent Hoboken history in microcosm, and Hoboken isn't a town its residents give up on easily. Its frequent flooding, its crowded streets, its parking problems, its throngs of revelers — Hobokenites complain about all of it, but continue to be protective of their intimate, friendly, walkable city tucked away in the shadow of the Hudson County palisade.

Even Maxwell's co-owner, booker and guiding spirit Todd Abramson admits he was deeply ambivalent about saying goodbye, and nearly changed his mind at the 11th hour. When he announced the closing in early June, he was overwhelmed by the outpouring of appreciation and love from musicians and fans who could not imagine Hoboken without Maxwell's.

Abramson cites the changing nature of Hoboken as a reason for the club's closure. Notably, he still lives in town.

A SCENE GROWS

Maxwell's did not open in an artistic vacuum. In the decaying apartment buildings and tenements, there was already a small creative community, drawn to Hoboken by the cheap rents and the beauty of the architecture.

"The first thing I noticed about Hoboken was how attractive the buildings were," says Eileen Lynch, who moved to town in 1974, "and how much more interesting it was than West New York, which is where I was from. At that time, you didn't move south in Hudson County, and you definitely didn't move to Hoboken. I had a friend who grew up by the Duncan Avenue projects in Jersey City and she wouldn't go to Hoboken, either. Honestly, I never felt unsafe."

Lynch, who now works for the Hoboken Museum, describes a city of secrets; a town of tall brick walls, cyclone fencing and factories falling into disuse.

She recalls the thrill of walking across broken glass to get to the Hudson River and, most of all, she remembers the easy camaraderie of the first wave of artists to settle in town. The early scene produced one excellent band: the Insect Trust, a psychedelic folk outfit with a taste for idiosyncrasy, mystery and experimentation that foreshadowed the Hoboken Sound of the '80s.

But with no place to play, the possibility of an explosion of musical talent seemed remote.

Enter Fallon. When the Paterson native first explored Hoboken, he discovered many bars, but not much activity. The Maxwell Tavern was open only during factory shift changes — between the hours of 5 and 7 p.m., and 11 p.m. to midnight.

"Hoboken had the kind of places with lots of aluminum foil behind the bars, 35 cent beers," says Fallon. "Maxwell Tavern had maybe two bar stools and three chairs. It needed a lot of work."

The Fallon family bought the place and started putting that work in. The kitchen needed to be steam-cleaned for three days. The fabled back room, which would be the site of so many historic concerts, was totally dilapidated: Fallon describes three weeks of 10-hour days spent stripping the wood.

Once the bar opened for business, his sister and brother took over the restaurant; Fallon, who lived above Maxwell's, handled the evening part of the operation. And while Maxwell's would serve very good food over the years, it was the evenings that made the room famous.

"I was lucky enough to be the first person to walk through the door with a tape," says Morrow, who will reunite with 'a,' his late-'70s band, to play Wednesday night's finale concert.

The band 'a' -- which later became the Bongos -- plays the first-ever rock show at Maxwell's.Courtesy of Richard Barone

The bar owner remembers it slightly differently. Although that 'a' concert — held in the front room because the back space wasn't ready yet — is widely recognized as the first in Maxwell's history, Fallon recalls hosting jazz bands before that.

But it is for bands such as 'a' and the Bongos — the group that evolved from 'a' — that the club would become known.

Both Fallon and Lynch say that once Maxwell's opened and began to get traction, musicians began moving to Hoboken in considerable numbers. And once they did, they'd often dig in and take property in the town.

"I remember looking at Washington Street in '82," says Rob Grenoble, musician and owner of Hoboken's Water Music Recording Studio, "and thinking, 'What a dump, it's a good thing I'm just passing through.'"

Needing a place to stay, he was told to check in at the corner restaurant that had become the de facto community center for rockers.

"Steve was behind the bar," remembers Grenoble. "I said I was a musician and I needed an apartment. He waved over a guy who had a deal for me: $250 and the entire floor of an apartment. In one minute, it was done."

Grenoble has been a pillar of the Hoboken arts scene ever since.

GLORY DAYS

The mid-'80s are often considered the heyday of Maxwell's. Bands such as the Bongos, the Feelies, the dB's, the Fleshtones and Yo La Tengo were attractions at the club; they first earned regional reputations, then national ones.

Maxwell's sold hand-drawn tickets at Pier Platters and Blackwater Books, local bands recorded at Water Music and ate cheaply at the town's revived restaurants.

Happily overburdened, Fallon hired Abramson to help him with the bookings in 1986; later, he opened up a crafts shop a few blocks north of the Hoboken PATH station.

College rock was finding its footing and Maxwell's would take its place among a coterie of first-rank independent clubs accessible to enterprising touring bands: the 9:30 in Washington, D.C., the 40 Watt in Athens, Ga., Boston's Middle East.

Maxwell's may or may not have been the best sounding room — but there was little dispute that it was the friendliest.

"Todd was like my younger brother," says Fallon. "We had the same tastes. More importantly, we didn't do the five-band, screw-you, open-a-calendar-and-write-a-name-down thing. We wanted the bills to have some coherence.

"Everybody who walked through the door was our friend. That was the deal."

Andy Gesner played Maxwell's many times in the '80s with Spiral Jetty, a New Brunswick band that saw the Feelies as role models and the Hoboken scene as inspirational.

The bassist, an indie rock lifer who now runs a music video promotion company, remembers Fallon's habit of entering the back room, hanging by the pole and listening in on a few songs. If the owner stuck around, it was a positive sign.

"You knew you were always going to get top-notch sound," says Gesner. "You knew you'd be fed by the establishment, which was always a huge plus for a touring band. You knew the shows would be thoughtfully constructed. And because of the way they treated the musicians, you know you weren't dealing with the dastardly and the deceptive and the dodgy."

By 1985, the secret was out. Springsteen shot his "Glory Days" video at Maxwell's; New York TV station WNEW aired an hour-long special on the Hoboken Sound.

Yet even as the Mile Square flirted with national recognition, its aesthetic remained local and approachable. The music was redolent of back alleys and vacant lots. At a time of unrivaled glitz in popular music, Maxwell's provided an alternative — and, in its playful way, a challenge.

The Feelies epitomized the Maxwell's band: The frontman stood at the side of the stage, wore sunglasses and barely acknowledged the presence of the crowd. When he plugged in and began to strum, the whole room would turn upside down.

As the musical underground was getting commercialized in the "alternative" music boom, real estate prices in Hoboken were skyrocketing. The redevelopment that began in the '70s had picked up its pace. Both the town and its landmark club had to cope with the consequences of success.

"We were never promoters," says Fallon. "The band got 99 percent of the door. Sometimes, it was 150 percent of the door because they didn't make any money and I'd go into my pocket. When the mortgage became double what it was when we started, I couldn't do that anymore. I realized if we changed our policies, everyone would hate us, and for good reason."

In 1995, Fallon sold the club and moved to Rehoboth Beach, Del. Its new owner took down the trademark coffee cup hanging over the door and installed a microbrewery in the front of the restaurant.

Bookings remained good, but the feel of the room was different. Hoboken had changed.
The Maxwell's era was over.

THE COMEBACK

Only it wasn't.

If Maxwell's had been an ordinary club, or even an ordinary-great club in an ordinary city, this is where the story would have ended.

The microbrewery experiment would have failed and the town would have moved on, cherished memories of terrific concerts intact.

Instead, in 1998, Abramson, Hoboken musician Dave Post and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley pooled funds and bought the club back. And Hoboken, well aware of the jewel that had almost fallen out of its crown, responded with renewed enthusiasm.

The interior of the restaurant was redone; the sound in the back room, already good, got better. Old friends returned and established new traditions: As the decade turned, Yo La Tengo, now internationally famous, kicked off its practice of playing each night of Chanukah.

Gesner, now a promoter, helped Abramson pick up the slack, booking more than 70 concerts in the room and extending the club's long-running policy of giving a stage to the offbeat and the idiosyncratic.

The Independent Music Festival briefly turned the Mile Square into a sonic laboratory. Young artists took property in the club as fiercely as their forebears did.

Maxwell's, and Hoboken, got something of extreme rarity — a second golden era.

Val Emmich was one of the stars of the millennial Maxwell's scene. He was an aspiring rocker on that stage in 2001; by 2004, he was recording for a major label. He would go on to make eight albums and tour nationally; each tour was anchored by a Maxwell's show.

Val Emmich, shown performing at the club in 2011, was one of the second wave of musicians who made Maxwell's their home base.Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger

"I'm mourning as a spectator and a performer," says Emmich, who lives in Jersey City. "I really thought I would be old and gray and still doing shows there. I didn't think it would ever fall.

"For me, personally, it's hard to separate my life as a musician from Maxwell's. I'd always feel a little off balance if a few months had gone by and I hadn't been back."

So successful was the Maxwell's rebound that an unofficial satellite club opened in Jersey City. Uncle Joe's, a bar in what would become the Powerhouse Arts District, was booked by Maxwell's veteran Chris Ward.

Uncle Joe's managed to turn the same trick that Maxwell's had, reversing the flow of traffic across the Hudson. Lured by strong indie bills and a relaxed, communal aesthetic, New Yorkers were making the trip to Jersey. But Uncle Joe's could not withstand the sharp uptick of property values in the area, and was sold to real estate developers in 2005.

In Hoboken, when the old Maxwell House factory was redeveloped into the Maxwell Place condominium complex, musicians saw the end coming. The redevelopment that had begun at Washington and 11th had boomeranged back to the club's doorstep.

"Toward the end of my run booking shows," says Gesner, "I definitely started to experience more and more bands moving out of Hoboken. It's gotten harder to find a place to live, harder to park. Just seeing those huge towers there instead of the Maxwell House plant was a totally different vibe, and a buzzkill. It was a sign that the New Hoboken was here and it was maybe time to go."

Traces of the Maxwell's aesthetic are still apparent all over Hoboken. Tunes, one of Jersey's best independent record stores, holds out against the anonymity of the digital revolution in a large space on Washington Street. The Symposia Bookstore does the same a few blocks north. Water Music remains one of the most respected recording studios in the Garden State.

But without its flagship venue, Hoboken, which has defined itself by its artists for the past three decades, feels unmoored.

"You can have a lot of things in town," says Grenoble, "but the venue is the radar. Without Todd and Maxwell's, we've lost our radar.

"Hoboken is still full of musicians and artists: The Neumann Leather building is teeming with them. Cockroaches and pop musicians will always survive. But it's feeling like the end of a remarkable success story."

Four more nights before Maxwell's closes. The last shows are:

Sunday: Mission of Burma, an inventive Boston punk-rock band, finishes up a two-night Maxwell's stand with a sold-out show. The group, which broke up in the '80s but reunited in 2002, made music that foreshadowed much of what we now call "indie" rock — "Signals, Calls, and Marches," its 1981 debut, is remarkably modern-sounding.
Monday: Val Emmich, an emotionally forthright Jersey City singer-songwriter who has always treated Maxwell's as his home base, shares a bill with the swinging Montclair combo Bern & the Brights and U.K. pop act Secret Islands. $10 tickets are still available; call (201) 798-0406 or visit maxwellsnj.com.

Tuesday: Noisemaker Lee Ranaldo, one of the guitarists in Sonic Youth, plays the penultimate night at Maxwell's with his band The Dust. (Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley is one of the co-owners of the club.) Single Dynamite and Houndmouth fill out the bill. The show is sold out.

Wednesday: Nobody's exactly sure what the finale will be like, but Glenn Morrow's Individuals, 'a' (the band that evolved into the Bongos) and the Bongos themselves are expected to close the door on the legendary back room. Meanwhile, the street outside Maxwell's will be closed, starting at 4 p.m., for a block party.